when I put my ZD glass on the EM5: wow, look at what I can pull out of shadows now, look at what was hiding in that blown highlight. I can lift, suppress, enhance in PP and no banding no artifacts. The sharpness and detail of the better ZD's? It's sharper and more detailed now.

Is it worth passing on that so you can have an OVF? Wasn't for me.

From my perspective, I got D7000 performance,

Yours is a skewed perspective though. All of a sudden, you've discovered the beauty in being able to do some decent manipulation on a RAW file and you've gone crazy with sensor love. Well guess what, other manufacturers have been giving you this ability for many, many years. Half a decade ago when some people switched to nikon, and were going 'wow' back then, most people on 1022 just didn't want to know, but now that Oly finally has stuck a decent sensor in a camera, its a different story isn't it ....

Oh ... and the EM5 is STILL lagging something like a half decade old D3 in terms of sensor output. If you want reality, its very, very close to D300s (as in virtually identical) in terms of noise and base ISO DR. Its only with the newer sensor technology that it pulls ahead in allowing the DR to be maintained higher up the ISO range. Oh, and the D300/s doesn't band either. And the D7000 is ahead again. All that's happened is that Oly has nearly caught up, which is a good thing, but for many, its a case of too little, and too late. Hell ... when the E1 came out, look what Canon had in the original 5D ? and now we're talking a long, long time ago....

Ha! I often chuckle at this myself. When canikon had these benefits and qualities a long time ago, apparently people here didn't need it or saw no benefit from it and now that they're getting just a taste of it - they're raving about it and they're still not realizing how far behind olympus still is overall. It shows that people here can be biased at the expense of photography.

For me it isn't so much about brand but really what tool can I use to give me the ability and output I desire out of my work. I will not pass-up great photo op's and quality of output for extreme brand loyalty and this is what many here are doing. They're not gonna like hearing that but the fact that they are raving about performance that the compeition have had for years which is something they always belittled says it all.